This latest book by perhaps the foremost scholar of the nineteenth-century Yucatán Peninsula continues a line of inquiry the author commenced in his acclaimed first book, Yucatán’s Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War (University of Texas, 1996). In both works Terry Rugeley argues that political and economic change in the early Mexican Republic led to ever increasing levels of endemic violence on the Yucatán Peninsula. The eruption of the Caste War in 1847 was not an atavistic spasm of Maya people seeking to reclaim their ancient glories and freedoms but was rather a sharp, inadvertent escalation of the violent tensions that had been intensifying in Yucatecan life since the end of the colonial era. Rugeley’s main intention in this new volume is to explore how the Caste War and a concurrent series of civil wars among Hispanics made violence in myriad forms an inextricable part of the...

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